Yes, I've just been hit by this as well. Basically the Photobucket business strategy was to 1) offer people free space for images, and let them build up a substantial portfolio of photos then 2) make the site so ad-intensive it was unusable and 3) offer an add-free subscription to put it back where it was. This clearly didn't have the desired take-up, so 4) they yesterday said that any external reference to a photo was a breach of contract and killed any external linkage, demanding a massive subscription to re-enable this. Presumably the idiot who thought this up believed that people would have no alternative but to pay, and all would be well. My guess is that this isn't going to work: after 40 years in business I'm sceptical that making your service unusable and then demanding payment to return it to usability isn't a good model. Holding your customers to ransom by unilaterally removing one of the main functions you provide (photo storage for social media and web businesses) and demanding payment doesn't seem a good approach either. As well as being nothing special in terms of ease of use, and inferior in terms of editing photos in situ, nor being particularly fast, the Ts&Cs indicate that there is no guarantee of security even for folders/photos marked as 'private'. Against their competitors, I can't see why anyone would pay for their service unless it was simply to unlock their existing photo storage in order to support existing blogs, business websites etc.

Sadly, I suspect that most members won't have the time to re-upload their photos, rendering older threads less useful. Hopefully, over the next few months, posters will transition to uploading their photos to the babybmw photo hosting instead.

Last edited by msej449 on Fri Jun 30, 2017 9:40 pm, edited 1 time in total.